You want to learn how to do SEO for website top Google but …
- You do not know where to start learning?
- There are too many documents on SEO web guidelines on Internet that make you feel confused?
Don’t worry, I’ve encountered a case like you! 6 months continuously plugging in to learn SEO but I did not understand anything! However, after more than 2 years of continuous learning, testing and applying, now I and my team have built up the prestigious GTV SEO brand in the SEO world.
More than anyone else, I understand that you are in need of a systematic knowledge of SEO – Search engine optimization, so that it can:
- Have a solid SEO background, confident implementation
- Understand all the main work that needs to be done in web SEO
- Understand the root of the problem, know what you have learned, and what additional knowledge is needed to learn
With 8 chapters covering all the SEO tasks you need to master, I am confident that this SEO tutorial will give you a solid SEO foundation!
Let’s get started right away!
CHAPTER 1: BASIC INFORMATION ABOUT SEO
Before stepping into learning effective SEO techniques and methods 2019, let’s start with the most basic knowledge of SEO.
Chapter 1 of this SEO guide will help you to understand the whole concept of SEO as well as how search engines work. Let’s see it!
How to do SEO for website – What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It consists of a set of methods to help improve the ranking of a website on the search engine results page – SERPs (usually Google).
SEO was born in the 90s when search engines were first known. Today, SEO web has become an essential marketing strategy and a thriving field.
If you want to learn SEO, you should be prepared both mentally and skillfully to be able to perform tasks that require creativity, good technical skills and good analytical skills. Each skill will target at different goals. However, the common point is to get the highest rank on the Google results page.
To put it simply, SEO web is about optimizing the right website so that businesses can reach the right leads.
To make a good SEO, your website not only needs a perfect structure or good technical foundation, but the content on the web must be quality and optimized to suit the needs of readers.
And of course, this content must be extremely impressive for other websites to be willing to share your article and link back.
Is SEO difficult?
Search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo! and other websites are ranked on the search results page based on different ranking algorithms.
Can we identify these algorithms? Yes and no!
Let me explain to you!
Google uses more than 200 ranking factors. Although you already know quite a few of them as:
- Quality content
- Number and quality of backlinks
- Techniques to increase page load speed, …
However, many other ranking factors remain confidential and no SEO-er can claim with certainty that they can grasp all of these factors.
Of course, you don’t need to know all the factors to rank for your site. To understand what SEO is, imagine it as a bowl of soup.
There are 3 important components:
- The bowl: represents the techniques behind the site (SEO technical and onpage SEO) – without the proper bowl, the soup will spill over the table, right?
- Soup: represents the content of your website – that is the most important part. Poor quality content makes the site rank low, very simple.
- Spices: represents quality backlinks, increases the authority and credibility (authority and trust) of the website – the final ingredient to make your SEO soup perfect.
Internet users use search engines when they are searching for information, products or services. And you will want your business to appear at the top of the website when users search for information related to your products or services.
It doesn’t matter if you’re selling products, services, blogs or anything else, SEO web is a must for users to find your business!
If it is done properly, SEO web will improve your site’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs – Search Engine Result Pages). Higher rankings mean higher traffic to your website, which in turn brings conversion value.
In short, if you want to succeed with your website, you need to do SEO.
How to do SEO for website – How to learn SEO effectively?
Even small and basic changes can make a big difference in the way search engines “scan” your site.
In this beginner’s basic SEO web guide, I will cover all the important topics and basic knowledge of how to be a top SEO Google so that you can learn and develop yourself in SEO.
If you wonder how to learn SEO in 2019, we have a simple answer for you: You will need a lot of research and practice.
The good news is that you can easily find tons of free information on the Internet (including this web SEO guide) but you should choose and apply it wisely. In addition, you can attend SEO training courses to update the latest knowledge!
Basic SEO terms
- 4 main pillars in SEO: onpage SEO, offpage SEO, Entity and Technical
- 3 schools of SEO: white hat SEO, black hat SEO and gray hat SEO
- SEO onpage – SEO offpage – Entity – Technical
There are 4 main pillars in SEO that any SEO-er needs to understand:
- Onpage SEO: All the optimal work is deployed on your web to tell Google and users that: “How good is my website”
- Offpage SEO: All optimization work is carried out on “other sites” in order to tell Google and users that “How good are others talking about my site?”
- Entity: Building and connecting discrete information entities into a unified cluster, helping Google identify websites that represent real businesses in the online market.
- Technical: How to make content on your site be crawled and be indexed easily by search engines.
Onpage SEO (on-site)
Onpage SEO includes optimization techniques that are implemented right on the website itself to increase rankings – from content optimization to technical aspects such as:
- Keyword research: Which words do potential customers use to find information about your products or services?
- Meta description: Appealing description of the page content and calling users to click on the article on the website
- Optimize page title (title): Set attractive titles, contain keywords and stimulate readers to click on the page to see more
- URL structure: Make sure the path of the article is short, easy to remember and matches the content on the URL itself.
- Content: Provide quality content and is appropriate for the purpose of the user’s search
- Structured data: Provide structured information that helps Google bot to better understand website content
- User experience (UX): Ensure good site navigation and bring a positive experience for web visitors.
… and many more that I will mention in chapter 3 of this article SEO web guide.
Offpage SEO (off-site SEO)
Offpage SEO covers all the activities you can do to improve the SEO authority of the website through backlinks from other websites. There are many ways for you to create backlinks:
- Deploy email outreach
- Write guest blogs
- Post on social networks
- Cooperate with influencers
- Write valuable content, let people love it and point the link back to your website
… and many other ways that I will mention and guide you in chapter 6.
As for Entity and Technical, I will explain in more detail in the following chapter.
- White hat SEO – Black hat SEO – Gray hat SEO
The terms “black hat” and “white hat” originated from Western films, like “bad image” and “good image”. But don’t take these two concepts too seriously.
There is no such thing as completely ugly, nor is there anything as completely good. These two SEO methods have their own advantages and disadvantages which are suitable for different areas and goals of the business
Black hat SEO:
Black hat SEO uses tactics, techniques that do not require obeying Google laws. To be frank, sometimes it is immoral, in order to get the results you want (for example, better rankings).
Black Hat SEO is designed to manipulate search engines and is rarely focused on user experience.
Black hat SEO techniques can get your site to the top of the SERP in a short time, however, search engines will sooner or later discover that and your site will be penalized and completely removed from the SERP.
White hat SEO
White hat SEO applies tactics, website optimization techniques that are recognized by Google to bring users the best search results. With white hat SEO, you put users first.
“White-hat” SEO is a long-term and proper strategy designed to improve user experience with techniques:
- Quality and relevant content
- Overall site optimization
- Link building
There is also a term called Gray Hat SEO – a less risky way than the “black hat” technique.
The gray hat SEO technique is not clearly defined by Google so you can get thousands of users to the site while not being penalized or losing your top one day.
At the moment, the SEO community is still arguing about which SEO schools to choose. This selection depends on the key factors:
- Time to deploy and see the effectiveness
- Business areas
- Short-term strategy and Long-term strategy
- …
CHAPTER 2: SEARCH TOOL
In chapter 2 of this guide to top Google SEO, you will learn:
- How search engines work
- How people use search engines
- The type of commonly used search queries
We will “save” the technical foundation behind Google.
Let’s take a closer look at what are the most typical search engines and ranking factors you should focus on!
How does search engine work?
In this video I have explained how search engines work. You can watch the video to better understand what I share!
Search engine performs 3 main activities:
- Crawling: scratching the data
- Indexing: indexing
- Picking the results: refine the results
The process goes as follows:
- Crawl the data
Crawl means that thousands of small search robots will scan all sections, content, keywords, titles, links, images, etc. on the website.
Any data that can be found on the web page is crawled.
The “bot” will crawl throughout every corner, detect all the links on one site that lead to other sites.
They then analyze those pages for new links repeatedly. The bot will crawl the entire internet regularly to keep updating new data.
- Indexing
When the site is crawled, indexing will take place. Imagine the index is a huge catalog or a full library of websites that comes from all over the world. It usually takes between 1 and 10 days for a website to get indexed.
Tip: You can check which of your on-page pages are indexed by using this search operator: site: domain.com
Moreover, every time the site changes, the bot will scan again. Remember that only when web page updates are indexed, they will be displayed on search engines.
- Select the result
Search results are important for both developers and users.
When the internet user sends the search, the search engine looks in the indexed database and retrieves the matching results.
It has a query checking process for billions of websites based on different algorithms.
Search engine companies (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!) keep secrets about exact algorithms to rank websites. However, many ranking factors have been “explored”.
Ranking factors
Most of these ranking factors have been proven, but some are just speculations or not even “myths”. On top of that, some factors are more important than others.
You don’t need to know all the ranking factors to learn SEO, but having an overview is better, right?
One of the most important factors, a backlink profile is created based on the number and quality of backlinks leading to your site. Google has an approximate view of the website’s authority. Each backlink is basically no different from a quote.
Some other important ranking factors include (in no particular order):
- Use LSI keywords and normal keywords
- HTTPS
- Related backlinks
- Grammar and spelling
- Authority / reputation of the website
- Social share
- Website age domain (domain) website
- AMP
- Page layout
Ranking factors can be divided into on-page SEO factors (including technical SEO) and link building or off-page SEO.
How people use search engines
Summary: The main point of SEO is that it is both user friendly and search engine friendly. If you invest all your money and time in SEO techniques, this is a great thing.
But if user interaction is poor, your location may be affected. User experience is always a top priority.
The image below represents one of the popular user journeys in Google Search:
Interactions with search engines have evolved over the years. However, the steps still remain the same:
- Users are in need of a solution, information or answer
- They enter demand as a query (keyword) into the search engine
- See the first search results
- Click one or more results
- Browse through web pages for answers
- Browse through more results on search results page 1 and / or change the search query, if the answer is found.
How to do SEO for website – Search engine market share
In the charts below, you can see which search engine that people use the most. Data are taken from the statistical reports of Netmarketshare.
How do we categorize search queries?
There are three types of search purposes:
- Search navigation purpose
- Find information purpose
- Search transactions purpose
- Seek commercial surveys / reviews purpose
To be able to understand in detail the content of the next section is keyword classification based on search purposes, you need to understand 4 search purposes.
Updated SERP
Most websites around the world are being updated daily, weekly or monthly. This proves that the internet grows every day.
As new websites emerge and search engines innovate to index, natural search results may change.
Another very important factor is that the Google algorithm is constantly changing. Minor edits may not cause anything significant, but a major algorithm update is no different than an earthquake.
What I’m trying to say is: even if you are the winner – top # 1 Google, your position can be replaced by your competitors one day.
In the chart below, you can see the importance of the highest ranking in Google depending on their natural CTR distribution for May 2019 (based on Advanced Web Ranking data).
SERP Feature
The SERP Feature is all results displayed on the SERP search results page, not the Organic Search results.
There are about 16 different SERP features you’ll see on Google’s search results page:
Why should you care about these features? Because it affects user behavior when they see the SERP. Because users have found the answer right on Google itself, in many cases the CTR of the top websites is lower than usual.
The first result that appears before the top 1 is Google’s top 0 – featured snippet, with all the most condensed information, so you won’t need to look at other results.
Besides, there are:
CHAPTER 3: How to do SEO for website – SEO ON-PAGE
To implement on-page SEO you need a fairly long checklist of tasks to be done.
A few years ago, on-page SEO mainly performed optimally optimized meta tags, content and titles. However, if you want to learn SEO in 2019, you will find that there are many more interesting things and on-page tools.
Join me in this issue.
Search engine algorithms are becoming more sophisticated than they were in the days when just cramming mountains of keywords into content, titles and descriptions is enough to achieve high rankings.
If you want to learn SEO, you must learn to innovate with modern SEO. One of the biggest improvements of search engines is that they consider the human element, in other words, user engagement.
Meta description
A meta description is a brief piece of information displayed on a Google results page, helping to summarize the site content for users and bots to understand briefly about the content they are about to access.
Titles and meta description tags contain keywords that do not directly affect your rankings BUT they still strongly influence CTR and user interaction in general.
Therefore, they are still very important for SEO.
There are many tools and plugins (for example, Yoast SEO for WordPress) that analyze your content using key keywords in meta titles, meta descriptions, headings, overall keyword density, alt attributes of images. and many other things.
Yoast SEO tool offers a lot of suggestions for optimization, but it’s hard to follow these checklists when it comes to the human element.
Make sure you consider both search engine optimization and user experience when creating meta tags.
- Find out what users are looking for
- Do you plan to write on a topic that people are looking for?
- Are you sure your views are different and unique?
- Can you write new content updates better for the topic?
- Is the right time for you to publish your article?
These are big questions before you start writing, whether it’s a blog or a landing page.
There are many ways to find answers to these questions.
Keyword research is a mandatory part. I will specifically guide how to research effective keywords in chapter 5.
- Title Tag and headlines
Create a great title tag, meta description and headlines.
Your main SEO keyword still has to be, so that users know what your site is about. Use meta descriptions to emphasize the call to action (CTA).
Convince both users and search engines that your site is the one that is worth clicking.
Remember: Always pay attention to user interaction, so don’t overstate the truth by using the words “poor to” or too nonsense.
Consider how your competitors do, learn from them and strategically implement content optimization for these keywords for your website!
Quick tips for title and title tags:
- Google allows displaying up to 70 characters of the title and up to 155 characters of meta description (updated in May 2019).
- Make sure to use the correct <h1>, <h2>, <h3> structure, so that the post is well structured and increases readability.
- Check the search results in advance with tools like our SERP simulator (image below), SEO Site Checkup or plugin for WordPress.
- Use SEO friendly URLs
- Avoid using dynamically generated URLs with a confusing array of characters:
www.vidu.com/2017/post318e7a349f6
- Choose the URL showing the content of the page:
www.vidu.com/hoc-seo-top-google
If you use WordPress, you can install permalinks in general settings.
SEO experts and bloggers say that short URLs get to the top easier. I think it depends on the issue of user experience. However, this does not mean that a 20-word URL will be fine!
- Diverse types of content used:
Do you want to attract users to the website? Use images, infographics, charts and videos. They help reduce bounce rate and increase interaction.
Optimal checklist:
- Optimize images by naming unsigned images, related to the content of the images, optimize alt tags for images
- Embed videos, charts into posts

- External link and internal link
Using external links gives Google a signal that your topic is appropriate.
Make sure your links lead to relevant pages and authority pages.
Internal links are a perfect way to promote your articles or other website sections. Deploying internal links helps users access the page more easily to the information they are looking for, thereby making the page more interactive.
Internal links also help Google bots understand web structure.
Quick tips
a) External links may not directly improve your rankings, but they should be used.
b) Use up to 2-3 internal links, depending on the length of the article.
c) The Google bot will scan these links, so don’t try to cheat and be careful if the links are broken.
d) Follow the topic cluster model for internal links
6. Let everyone interact
You think: Great content will viral itself and be known to everyone?
It’s far away from the “natural musk incense” period. Nowadays, everyone becomes lazier, so the social share buttons must always be on your website.
According to BuzzSumo, the percentage of social sharing has dropped by 50% since 2015.
Besides Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, consider deploying more specific and topic-related social networks, such as Reddit, Pinterest, and more.
CHAPTER 4: SEO TECHNICAL
SEO Technical usually requires the person who develops this technique to have at least some coding or web developer skills. But do not be too afraid, if your website is built on WordPress platform, it will be very easy to optimize this part.
These are the most important technical elements that you should focus on:
Install Google Search Console:
Setting up Google Search Console (webmaster tool) is one of the must-have tools when SEO website gets to the top of Google, helping you track and maintaining the presence and performance of your website in Google Search.
This website administration tool will help you:
- Analysis of keyword rankings
- CTR
- Google Penalties
- And many other useful data for technical SEO.
Other features include reviewing content that is relevant to the mobile interface, submitting URLs you want Google to index, page errors, data structure errors, and links.
Quick tip:
- All properties (websites) need to be verified to use Search console features.
- Connect Search Console with Google Analytics.
- How to verify your property (website) in Search Console
How to do SEO for website – Website speed
Page speed is one of the ranking factors that you should improve regularly.
If the website does not load and displays within 3 seconds, the user will leave.
Tips here:
- Check the speed in Page Speed Insights.
- Optimize images, enable GZIP compression, compress HTML, minimize JS and CSS, and try to reduce server response time.
- Quality web hosting plays a big part in website speed, so make sure to choose a reliable provider.
Optimized for mobile phones
Optimizing your website for mobile display is a must.
The whole world is moving from using desktop to mobile. In fact, implementing a website that is not optimized for mobile devices will have a negative impact on your rankings.
Google actually released the updated Mobile First Index in March 2018. Accordingly, Google will use the mobile version of the website to index and rank.
Quick tip:
- Test your site’s responsiveness in Mobile-Friendly Test.
- Track your keyword rankings in mobile search results.
- Make sure the mobile version of your website works smoothly.
You may also consider AMP. It has expanded HTML code with custom properties that allow static content to be displayed faster.
Sitemap
A sitemap is a file that lists all the web page sections, making it easy for search engines to crawl your content. Sitemaps are very handy when you run a large website with a complex structure.
Having a sitemap does not agree that your rankings will improve. According to Google, the sitemap is beneficial but without it, the website will not be penalized.
Quick tip:
- Not all websites need a sitemap.
- There are more types of sitemaps than just XML sitemaps.
- Sitemap should not contain more than 50,000 URLs and cannot exceed 50 MB.
- Put the sitemap in the root directory of the site:
Robots.txt
Robots.txt is a file telling bots of websites that you don’t want them to visit. It is structured as https://cainaylavidu.com/robots.txt and this notification file is completely public.
It helps when you don’t want some unnecessary scripts, files or images to be indexed.
Robot.txt syntax:
- User agent: * (example: Googlebot)
- Do not allow: / (e.g. /images/pizza.png)
Quick tip:
- Do not use robot.txt to hide content from search engines.
- Crawler or malware robots will not violate robot.txt
HTTPS and HTTP
In 2014, Google announced that it would increase the rankings of HTTPS / SSL websites. Currently, we all know that criteria only slightly affect rankings.
However, security is a strong psychological factor.
For example, Google Chrome, is labeled as an insecure website because it is not encrypted using SSL, and it interferes with user interaction.
Normalize URLs / IPs
IP normalization is important when a website is indexed under both its IP address and domain name.
URL normalization means: https://vidu.com and https://www.vidu.com/ will be the same URL.
CHAPTER 5: CONTENT AND SEO
Content & SEO are two independent terms or an ideal couple?
There is a common opinion among some marketers that perfect content does not need SEO.
That’s a mistake!
And I will show you why.
Seriously, can you imagine a website that is perfectly optimized with content that no one will read?
Some people still believe that:
- SEO is for search engines
- Content for users
It is wrong! Content & SEO always works together. You create unique and parallel content that optimizes it for search engines and viewers. This technique is sometimes referred to as “SEO content” or “SEO copywriting”.
How to do SEO for website – What content should I create?
This is the first and most important question.
The answer (at least in theory) is simple: Unique content.
Creating fresh, engaging and engaging content is a great start. Content and SEO must go hand in hand from the beginning. You can choose from different types of content:
#1. Blog
Good blogs are likely to attract users to ecommerce websites, businesses or professional service providers.
Tips:
– Be the original, not the copy. Writing unique content is always a prerequisite for blogging.
– Do your own research and use new data
– Length is not everything, but also quality and value for readers
– Be consistent in the content to create a strong personal brand
– Collaborate with companies and influencers
#2. Product page
Quality product pages should be a top priority for every online business.
Product pages are often used as landing pages for PPC campaigns, including AdWords remarketing or paid social media.
Quick tip:
- When it comes to e-commerce, you need to clearly describe the product, how much it costs and how to buy it (CTA).
- Use professional images of products and write compelling descriptions
- Website speed and UX are especially important
# 3. Case study
Case study is to introduce the world to how you do everything, share an interesting data you have collected, reveal what your customer satisfaction strategy is or how you failed to launch a new product.
Perhaps the best thing about case studies is that they are always unique and bring new information to readers.
Quick tip:
- Spend time doing research, preparing enough data and providing truthful and reliable information
- If you are writing about your business, show people the spirit and humanity of the business
- Do not use a wry tone of voice, people are not interested in the tedious success stories
Check out this survey about the benefits of Buzzsumo’s first research publication
# 4. Infographics
Everyone likes Infographic! They are easy to share and easy to download.
Creating infographics is making the information beautiful and easy to read.
Quick tip:
- Infographics still have great sharing and linking capabilities, so make sure you can use both data and design flexibly.
- Only use the most important data
- Create a story, add charts or photos
- When uploading infographics as images, don’t forget to write transcripts as the crawler cannot read the text in the images.
#5. Articles Tutorials, how-to, tips & tricks
Tutorial articles are often viewed as part of blogging.
“Instructions to do …” And “How to … ” are the catchy titles. You can write tutorials or how to do it, but keep in mind that there are thousands of similar articles.
Don’t copy others, though, but offer other tips & tricks to the competition.
Quick tip:
- Create your own video or at least use your screen shot videos and screenshots.
- Reach out to the product owner or seller so they can get a backlink or share their social media files
- If you are writing your own product guide, place the guide on the product landing page for more traffic and an internal backlink
# 6. Video
High engagement, social shares, likes, backlinks, lots of potential customers and conversions.
These are the biggest benefits of using video content. Videos can increase conversion rates by 80%.
Quick tip:
- Write the script first, then proofread and spin the script
- Prepare some budget for hardware as well as editing software or to hire a professional video producer
- Post translations, subtitles
- Develop a marketing plan or at least plan basic advertising activities to ensure the time and money you have invested
Of course, you don’t always need to create your own videos. You can share or embed videos made by an industry expert!
It can enrich your content and make readers stay longer on your site.
#7. Ebook
Ebooks are often used to generate leads.
Usually, B2B (business to business) pages will require an email address to download ebooks, but there are also B2C (business to customer) sites that do the same.
The reader does not naturally leave you information. You have to provide readers with good and quality ebooks.
Ebooks are usually in PDF format and contain a long piece of content.
Quick tip:
- Write it as a true book: excellent subject, catchy title, with preview, credible author, accurate word-editing and eye-catching design.
- Motivating users to download: use ebooks with unique content and special tricks which are unable to be found on your website or found in competitors’.
Ideal article length is …?
A few years ago, just cram keywords into articles could make it to the top easily.
Somehow, this approach has reached its peak, when there are almost hundreds of almost identical articles with the same keyword.
Creating content for its own sake no longer works.
If you write an article, you need to pay attention to the reader.
Posts must start with the title, opening paragraph, type of content and most importantly the overall content structure. Use exact <title>, <h1, h2, h3, …> and other HTML tags.
When it comes to time, posts with an average reading time of 7 minutes are ideal.
When it comes to web SEO, there is a lot of research. Most of them prove that longer posts rank slightly better.
What about duplicate content in articles or other parts of the web?
Sooner or later we will all have to write down a few words that we have mentioned in the website.
If there are too many duplicate content on your site, you can use 301 redirects or the rel = canonical link section.
You can learn more on the Google Search Console help page.
The algorithm which is developed by Google will distinguish whether you are performing a repetitive action or a natural part of new content, so stay calm.
If you are thinking of copying someone else’s content, you can stop reading this SEO web guide. I absolutely do not support stealing content from others. The risks, not to mention the costs, will be huge. Google will definitely penalize and remove your site from search results.
A popular tool for plagiarism detection is Copyscape. All you need to do is enter the URL of the article and search.
Don’t try to copy them, try to create your own unique content and optimize it perfectly.
Soon, you can start promoting.
CHAPTER 6: KEY WORDS
Keyword research is one of the basic SEO tasks.
In this chapter, you will learn how to find your niche and how to find profitable keywords that you can rank top of.
Creating content without keyword research will not be successful.
Content that is not properly optimized will not gain rankings and site traffic will be low.
You need to know what keywords can help you increase access to target and implement them.
Where to find keywords?
There are many different ways to find keywords, I have detailed instructions in this video, let’s watch!
Keyword Indicators
Previously, content creators only researched keywords to find keywords with high search volume and then stuffed them into content to deceive search engine algorithms, to ensure high rankings in natural search.
This is no longer useful because keyword research has become so much more complex!
These days you have to work with more metrics, considering the actual Google RankBrain and SERP algorithms you intend to rank.
How to do SEO for website – Google RankBrain
Keywords are associated with high search volume and low keyword difficulty – an ideal combination of the three most important elements of keyword research.
We call it the Tripod Rule in Keyword Research – because these three elements represent three feet. As soon as you take one of the legs, the tripod will collapse.
Unfortunately, it’s not always easy and you need to find a balance between these factors.
#1. Long-tail keyword compared to search volume (volume)
Start by searching for the long tail keyword or the middle tail.
Long tail keyword has a lower search volume but has a great potential for conversion
Visitors who find you via long tail keywords will interact with your content more and have a higher conversion rate from them.
Because the query is specific enough to find truly relevant results. And you will want to be at the top of the relevant results.
The biggest downside of long tail keywords is that the average monthly search volume is quite small. Sometimes, the volume of these keywords is lower than 100 monthly searches.
That’s why you need to find the right balance and a metric called Keyword Difficulty to help you achieve this.
#2. Keyword difficulty
When you find the keywords you want to rank for, you will need to assess how difficult it is.
Keyword Difficulty is a very useful metric that will help you with it.
Keyword Difficulty is usually expressed on a scale of 0 to 100. The higher the score, the harder it is for the SERP to rank 1.
There are many keyword research tools in the market for keyword difficulty calculation.
The values may vary – the same keyword but this tool gives 30 points and other tools give 50 points.
That’s because calculations are based on slightly different metrics and algorithms. It is important to compare results in the same tool.
# 3. Search intent
SERP analysis is a very important part of keyword research. It helps you find out:
- How can you compete against sites in SERP 1?
- Search intent behind the keywords you want to optimize
By looking at the SERP, you can determine the intent behind a user’s search query. If you’re looking for “home-made pizza recipe”, you don’t want to order a pizza.
Always keep this in mind to not optimize the wrong keywords.
There are 4 different types of search intent:
- Navigation – search for a specific website / brand (“google”, “youtube”, …)
- Information – search for general information (“how to brew coffee”)
- Transactions – user wants to buy something online (“buy iphoneX in reliable place”)
- Commercial – user performs research before buying (“Iphone X or Iphone XS”)
If you have a pizza recipe blog, don’t you need to rank # 1 for the keyword “pizza” (with over 4 million monthly searches globally)?
Take a look at SERP for keywords:
If you don’t intend to compete with Pizza Hut or Domino, trying to rank # 1 for “pizza” does not make any sense.
Yes, these types of keywords are very interesting, but in most cases they are irrelevant to your niche.
Moreover, they represent only a few of all searches around the world. The majority of searches are long tail queries.
How to QUOTE keyword research?
Newbie and impatient content creators often find a keyword with a high search volume in Google Keyword Planner or any other keyword research tool without paying attention to the other indicators.
As we explained above, finding an ideal keyword does not mean that you will choose keywords with high search volume.
Another mistake is misinterpreting the data. “Competiton” scores in Google Keyword Planner (GKP) and keyword difficulty index are often confused and wrong.
“Competiton” in GKP represents the level of competition in Google AdWords – not the difficulty to rank for that keyword.
Another thing you should avoid at all costs is keyword stuffing.
Keyword research is no longer about finding an ideal keyword and using it as much as possible.
Instead, select a focus keyword and use it in:
- Heading
- Title tags and meta descriptions
- Opening paragraph
- Body (only need to repeat a few times is enough)
Google has evolved and Google really understands what content is about.
If the content is well-written, comprehensive and user-friendly, you can really rank for keywords you don’t even use in your text.
Instead of using the same keyword multiple times, try searching for LSI keywords.
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords are semantically relevant keywords with the main head keyword.
LSI keywords often change based on current search trends and it will be good if you add these keywords to the content of the article. You can use LSIGraph to generate a variety of useful keyword ideas.
CHAPTER 7: LINK BUILDING
In chapter 7 of this top Google SEO guide, I’ll give you a detailed guide on link building – one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization.
Link building is your website getting links from other websites.
From a technical perspective, backlinks are hypertext links that serve as a navigation between web pages.
Links collected by search engines allow them to index web content.
Why is link building so important?
Search engines use links to discover new sites and to overall rank a site on SERP.
In other words, they discover new content and identify the authority of a website based on authority which is passed from outside sources.
The backlink profile of a website is one of the most important ranking factors.
When Google introduced PageRank in the 1990s, the number of backlinks pointing to websites was used as an important measure of overall rankings.
The more links you earn, the better your rankings.
But because this can be easily taken advantage of, Google has updated a number of algorithms that focus on penalizing shady link building techniques.
Today, link building is no longer about the number of backlinks, but mainly about the quality and relevance.
How to do SEO for website – Types of backlinks
Generally, there are 2 types of backlinks:
- Do-follow backlink: transfer the power and authority of the page of the linked page to the linked site. This flow of power is called link juice
- No-follow backlink: do not give any strength or reputation to the linked sites. No-follow backlinks have gawnsther HTML rel = “nofollow” notice the robot doesn’t care about the linked website when scanning through the web.
Anchor text
Anchor text is a visible piece of text that when you click on the hyperlink will redirect to a new website. Anchor text also known as link label, link text, or link title.
If there are many pages linking to your website using the same anchor text, your website will rank highly for these terms in search engines.
For example, if there are more than 100 websites pointing backlink to my website gtvseo.com/dao-tao-seo/ using the same word “SEO training” as anchor text, then it is highly likely that my website will be ranked top for the keyword “SEO training course” above.
You are thinking … All you need is a lot of backlinks pointing to the website with anchor text which is also an SEO keyword … However, it’s not that easy!
An over-optimized anchor text file may result in a penalty from Google. It is better to choose natural anchor texts than try to artificially refine them.
There should be a balance between the following 6 types of anchors:
- SEO keywords (“web SEO tutorials”)
- Trademarks (“GTV SEO”)
- Branded terms (“web SEO tutorials by GTV”)
- Generic anchor text (“web page”)
- Bare URL (“gtvseo.com”)
- CTA (“click here”, “read more”)
How to do SEO for website – The quality of backlinks
Google carefully checks the quality of the backlink pointing pages about your website:
- Domain Authority (DA): the reputation of the domain name
- Page Authority (PA): the reputation of a specific website
- Data on other linked profile quality
A few figures from Moz and Majestic can help us assess approximately these values:
- Moz Page Authority (PA)
- Moz Domain Authority (DA)
- Majestic Trust Flow (TF)
- Majestic Citation Flow (CF)
The higher the index, the higher the quality of the backlink.
When we look over Majestic “Trust Flow” and “Citation Flow”, we will get another review of links.
- Trust Flow indicates that websites which are linked to a reliable seed site will have a higher Trust Flow score, while sites that may have some suspicious links will see a much lower score.
- Citation Flow predicts the influence of a URL based on the number of websites that link to it.
Link building strategy 1: Guest Posting
Guest posting is probably the most popular link building technique.
The way guest posts is simple: You write a post and post it on another website. The site will receive free content and you will receive a free backlink. Win-win, right?
And of course, the rest depends on the quality. If you want a good backlink, you need the best guest post possible.
Link Building 2 Strategy: Backlink of the opponent
A time-consuming, but still effective backlink strategy is finding effective strategies with others.
Check sites that point backlinks to your competitors, then create better content and contact the admin of those sites to have them link to your site instead of your competitors.
Other link bulding strategies
- Link building based on extreme content: Creating extremely quality content will attract backlinks, social shares and referral traffic naturally.
- Backlink social networks: Share your content on social networks like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter or Pinterest, LinkedIn and participate in discussions with people about the topic of the article.
- Broken link building: Find websites with broken links and give them your article to replace that broken link.
- PR Newspaper: articles on business brands that are written by experts and published on reliable sites will give you high quality backlinks, but the cost for this section is quite high and you need to find suitable pages that are suitable for your field.
- Buy backlinks from similar websites
- Backlinks from forums, question and answer sites, top lists, comments (most of these backlinks are usually of no-follow or low quality form)
- Building satellite site system Private Blog Network (PBN)
Black hat technique and Google Penalty
Backlinks are paid and link with PBN will be another way to build links but these techniques are considered as black hat SEO (or gray hat) so that Google can detect and penalize your site.
On the other hand, these techniques are quite effective. You just need to be extremely careful and think about all the risks that can occur before going down the black hat path.
Google Penalty – Google Penalty
Google updated this algorithm from April 2012 to detect and penalize bad links, spam or low quality.
However, if you have spam or low quality backlinks that you didn’t create, don’t panic!
Google understands that not all bad backlinks are created on purpose and usually, the worst case scenario is that it will ignore them.
If you want to be sure, you can still reject such backlinks in Search Console.
Best practices
- Perform link building regularly, don’t just get inspired to do it once and then “get well”
- Some high quality links are much better than a bunch of low quality links
- Allocate natural anchor text density based on the tips I listed in the Anchor text section
- Avoid backlinks from poor quality spam sites
- Trying to get backlinks from high ranking sites will bring you referral traffic.
And now will be the last chapter you cannot ignore this effective SEO web tutorial. Find out now!
CHAPTER 8: How to do SEO for website – SEO TOOLS
Google Search Console, formerly known as Google Webmater Tool
Ahrefs
Already doing web SEO, you can’t help but know Ahrefs!
It can be said, Ahrefs is an extremely powerful tool and when it comes to the crawl of websites in the world, Ahrefs is second only to Google!
Because of this, Ahrefs is famous for its ability to help you analyze competitors (especially check the amount of backlinks of competitors).
Some other useful features include:
- Check and analyze website content, keyword
- Check the viral content by checking interactive indicators from social networks
- Keyword research
- Estimate the amount of traffic to the website
However, Ahrefs is a fairly expensive tool (with a 7-day trial) and often the Vietnamese SEO community will use the generic version to save more.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is one of the must-have plugins of any website which are using WordPress. By recommending page optimization guidelines, website articles, Yoast SEO gives you a clear view of how your website is displayed on Google.
In addition, the latest update of Yoast SEO now adds the ability to create XML sitemaps and even create Schema for the website to help you shorten your onpage optimization time.
Some useful features of Yoast SEO in suggesting edits:
- Title (page title)
- Meta description
- Whether or not an index page is available
- Target keywords of the article
how to do SEO for website – Google Analytics
A free web analytics tool provided by Google, Google Analytics helps you track and report website traffic metrics.
It can be said that Google Analytics is used by almost all websites in the world.
Google Analytics helps you review user activities on the website through the following indicators:
- Session duration (length of sessions)
- Pages per session (number of pages viewed per session)
- Bounce rate (bounce rate)
- Sources of traffic accessing the website
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tool is a free tool provided by Google that allows you to effectively manage the website and control the indexing and visibility of the website.
Specifically, Search Console helps you:
- Require index search engine and troubleshooting index
- Error message in website
- Review traffic data from Google (organic traffic) through viewing metrics:
- Click-through-rate (CTR) of each URL
- Keywords are often used by users to find you
How to do SEO for website – Google Tag Manager
Like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, Tag Manager is Google’s free tool.
However, in terms of functionality, Google Tag Manager tends to help you manage and attach tags (snippets, code or tracking pixels) on your website without having to use or have any knowledge of code.
How to do SEO for website – SEO PowerSuite
SEO PowerSuite is a paid toolkit that many SEO-ers consider using. With many small tools integrated, SEO PowerSuite has almost every function needed for web SEO, including:
- Audit and website optimization => Website Auditor tool (visually see the website structure, run a scan and check the website, export an analysis of TF-IDF)
- Keyword research and ranking tracking => SEO Rank Tracker tool (consider keywords to help businesses achieve high conversions, build keyword maps)
- Check your opponent’s backlink profile, compare your current website with your competitors => SpyGlass SEO tool
- Consider possibilities for linking with the LinkAssistant tool
It can be said that SEO is a constantly evolving industry that requires SEO web people to take the time to update the techniques and knowledge regularly.
In this article, I gave you a well-established web SEO knowledge system with detailed articles that you can learn more about. If you have any questions, feel free to ask questions below!
Hopefully this basic SEO web tutorial will be helpful for you, I wish you success!